Gears of War Judgment’s delicious diced leftovers

Gears of War Judgment isn’t a new game. It’s a remix. And a pretty good remix that fits Gears of War like a glove. What better way to present a game world that consists of a series of boxes than as a series of boxes? Judgment is divided into discrete bite-sized chunks of shooting that derive meaning not from the story — a series of flashbacks from B- and C-list characters — but from a scoring system. It’s no surprise that People Can Fly, the developers of Bulletstorm, know that there are other ways to make you want to shoot things than making a good game.

After the jump, I shoot, I score

The scoring system rewards the usual headshots and gibs, and punishes you for getting killed, but what it really wants you to do is play each box with an optional modifier. Maybe you’ll play the next ten minutes in four minutes, or you’ll use pistols only, or you’ll be socked in by a heavy fog, or extra monsters will pile on. It’s like the skulls in Halo, more varied, but not as flexible. What an inventive way to tweak the difficulty without simply tweaking the difficulty!

The main incentive to tweak the difficulty is collectible stars, which unlock a new campaign. Collectible stars make the whole thing feels like a Mario game, which isn’t a bad thing. Need for Speed: Shift is every bit as hardcore as Gears and it benefited from its Mario-esque collectible stars system. Judgment’s less effective gimmick is its emphasis on earning experience points to unlock visual frippery. Do you want Cole in a candy pink outfit with zebra stripes on his lancer? Of course you do. Level up, earn prize boxes, or just buy the stuff at the Microsoft Store with Real World Money. And then go online and enjoy the cavalcade of Gears players’ ridiculous fashion sense. Gears games play best when no one’s taking them seriously.

The online stuff is tweaked nicely, as you’d expect from a remix. The new horde mode doesn’t replace the long demanding grind of Gears 3’s 50-level horde mode; it instead complements it with shorter matches that give you three lives by pushing you backwards across a map. You also get a class system that encourages players to stop running around as if they were playing a deathmatch. I’m not convinced it works in public matches, but does anything ever work as designed in public matches? When I’m in public games, everyone but me sucks at horde mode, but Judgment makes them suck less.

Given the smaller scale of the action, cramming up to four AI players into every moment probably isn’t the best way to proceed. Anyone who isn’t charging forward with a chainsaw is going to spend a lot of time waiting for Baird et al. to get their fat asses out of the way. Except for Sofia, the obligatory Gearsgirl who I will never mistake for a monster. Okay, maybe a kantus. As usual, far be it from Epic to do anything with a female character that isn’t cringeworthy*. Sofia says she got to work on a secret missile project because the professor had a crush on her. You go, girl!

Some players might feel cheated that this cool new remix is a standalone retail package, especially considering how many maps were sold for Gears 3 instead of meaningful gameplay improvements (although the fortification upgrade and RAAM campaign were welcome exceptions). In light of all those maps, it’s easy to see why there are so few maps included with Judgment, which encourages you to buy a season’s pass for double experience points and therefore faster pink outfits and zebra stripes. But the bigger issue is that there’s no substantially new content. Yeah, sure, there’s a healing grenade and a creature who grows spikes to charge at you and a new d-pad-less weapon swapping scheme. But these are mostly the same guns, monsters, and combat sandboxes you already played, just arranged differently. Same gameplay, new framework. But given that this is currently my preferred way to get my Gears on, I can’t complain too loudly when I’m so busy trying to three-star each of the levels. Speaking of which:

Gears of War Judgment

Xbox 360

Here’s the big question I have about this Gears release… Will they release Horde mode as paid DLC? I have this feeling they are trying to sell me a hamburger without the patty.

I suppose I’m having a ‘Where’s the beef’ moment.

yoh

Gears of War Judgment better than Uncharted 3…. i lold hard

tomchick

It has a horde mode already! It’s called survival, I think. And there are only three maps, so I imagine the DLC will be more maps long before you get any new modes.

zosima

I get the impression that a lot of companies are burning off their remaining resources as they swap over to the next generation of consoles. (Which will require updated engines, higher quality modeling, textures, animations etc…) Why throw all that stuff out when you can just shove it out the door and make a few extra bucks off it?

Makes a lot of sense from a business perspective, just a shame that this iteration in a lot of IPs is kinda weak. (Gears of war, god of war, metal gear rising, DS3, my hopes are pretty low for AC4.) The ones that look pretty solid are the ones that are pretty obviously already built on technology that will work well on nextgen consoles. (Tomb Raider, Crysis 3)

http://www.facebook.com/sinkytown Roy Jones

Apparently there’s some Left 4 Dead-esque dynamism to the campaign’s encounters. Did you notice anything like that?

It’s a shame that the d-pad system has been ditched – I always thought it was especially elegant in how it mirrored your avatar.

tomchick

As near as I can tell it’s like the new game plus mode in the latest Devil May Cry, where you get a randomized set of monsters when you replay a level. The Gears games never really hurt for replay value, particularly since you can drop bots into the multiplayer modes (thanks, Epic, for staying true to your Unreal roots!). That’s certainly the case with Judgment as well.

Tom Bissell

Tom Chick! Big fan (except when we disagree). I co-wrote the script for GOJW, and am sorry you find Sofia cringeworthy. However, the line you call out is not in fact indicative of what you say it is. Sofia, at this point, is trying to cover up the fact that she and the (married) professor in question were once an item. She’s dissembling, trying to explain why she has access to the man’s lab. Later, when the squad needs access to the professor’s house, she cops to their relationship a little more, and finally just admits that something happened between them. She also says she broke it off. We tried to make this whole subplot as elliptical as possible, honestly. Obviously, this kind of stuff is rather challenging to sneak into a game when you get no more than ten seconds’ worth of expository downtime between the game’s pretty harrowing combat set pieces. The subplot was also intended to crack the goody-goody A-plus-student facade Sofia projects early in the game. (Um, it was also intended to explain how the hell any of them would know how to get into a secret tunnel beneath the professor’s house, which was a level design decision it fell to us to account for narratively.) Obviously, if you didn’t dig it, you didn’t dig it, but know that we very much wanted Sofia to be a tough, flawed, and real-seeming person, not a video-game love bunny. Cheers, and thanks for the review.

tomchick

Aw, now I feel like a schmuck for skipping so many of the cutscenes. That’s cool that you wrote them, Tom, but I’m not sure how I feel about you going over to the “dark side”. :)

But doesn’t the story make the usual mistake of defining Sofia by her sexuality when that’s not a factor for the male characters in the Gears series? Isn’t that just playing into the usual women-as-sex-objects role for women in so many videogames? Maybe I’m being unfair, and I don’t want to come across as stridently white knighting on this issue. Gears is what it is, and Judgment isn’t nearly as clunky for me as the usual Marcus Fenix stuff, so I have to give you credit for that. But I do wish that Sofia wasn’t defined by who she was sleeping with.

At any rate, I really appreciate you dropping into the comments section to clarify.

gearsfan

skipping cutscenes, still reviewing the game. gtfo

gearsfan

you’re talkin so much stuff thats not even true. there is no horde. there are 4 maps for survival. have you even playd the game?

Tom Bissell

My cowriter and I actually had a long talk about the whole defining-Sofia-by-sexuality issue. Like a long talk. We also had the very real problem of figuring out how to get them into the mansion’s secret tunnel (ah, video-game storytelling), and Sofia (being from Halvo Bay, and a student at the Academy) was the best candidate. You can probably guess how we got to her adulterous affair from there. We both knew we’d run the risk of what you’re saying the problem is, and said, “Fuck it, let’s at least try to sneak as much everyday human messiness into the tiny story cracks we’re given to fill.” I guess I would say including Sofia’s relationship doesn’t feel to me like our attempt to define her, though I can see why it might seem that way. Please tell me you agree that we underplayed it? Because we tried to. (We actually tried to underplay all the story stuff, since the core design idea at the beginning of the game was that its story, its real story, should be the player’s experience getting through the combat sections. Everything we did was just to provide drips of context and character here and there.) Anyway, with Sofia, tried to do something brief, haunting, character-ish. We hoped it would be affecting and interesting enough to annul the risk. And here we are. :)

tomchick

Well, it’s pretty clear that she’s got something going with the professor. But I didn’t come away with much of a sense for Sofia beyond “hot redheaded cadet”. My original comment was that she didn’t work on the missile because she was smart, but because she was fucking the professor. And I think it’s really cool that you guys actually struggled with that.

As for Sofia — or any of the other characters — I don’t blame you for any storytelling shortcomings so much as I blame Gears of War’s gameplay for not being really interested in that sort of thing, unless its the earlier game holding forth with long ponderous scenes about Marcus Fenix and Dom. If that was the alternative, I think you guys did exactly the right thing.

tomchick

You actually can’t skip most of the cutscenes since they’re covering for the loading. I know this firsthand.

tomchick

You got me! I haven’t even playd it. I did, however, read the box.

gearsfan

survival still is not the same as horde smartass

gearsfan

are you kiddin me? you said yourself that you skipped cutscenes? and you CAN skip the cutscenes about 1/3 through because loading is finished by then

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1532225716 Dave Nash

Because… you were trying to skip them? You shouldn’t ding story or character if you were mashing the skip button Tom.

http://www.facebook.com/warren.marshall Warren Marshall

Whole separate issue but it’s a shame that 3/5 linearly translates to 60% on metacritic when I feel that’s not what was meant. But such is life…

tomchick

I didn’t ding the story. I don’t really care about it one way or the other. And I stand by what I wrote about Sofia, even though I appreciate Tom dropping in to explain his thought process as the writer.

tomchick

In which case the dialogue plays over the gameplay anyway. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I heard everything I needed to hear.

tomchick

Maybe not to some borderline illiterate dude on the internet who calls himself “gearsfan”, but for everyone else, survival mode is a horde mode. But by all means, rage on!

tomchick

The problem is that many other sites use a 7-9 scale, so by their scale, this would be a negative review. The issue isn’t how Metacritic translates three stars, but how other sites don’t use anything below a 70%.

Roba

I got a lot of enjoyment out of horde mode in Gears 3 and it sounds like Survival is horde mode-ish. So, it’s either pretty ballsy of People Can Fly to say, ‘nah, we’ll do our own take on that,’ and not give people more of the same or… an opportunity to roll it out later for $$$. I’m cynical and think the worst of people. Full disclosure: I haven’t played Judgement yet.

http://www.facebook.com/warren.marshall Warren Marshall

Well, regardless of where the fault lies, the system is decidedly broken which was more my point.

http://www.facebook.com/warren.marshall Warren Marshall

That’s not really accurate. If you skip the cut scene, it’s skipped. The game doesn’t keep playing the audio afterwards if that’s what you meant.

tomchick

In my copy of the game, when I press the button while the characters are talking — that’s a cutscene to me — they keep talking as I’m dropped into the gameplay proper.

But on the longer cutscenes between the chapters — the prerendered tribunal scenes — the cutscenes are skipped entirely. I’m pretty sure I watched those, so gearsfan and Gears fans can rest assured that I probably caught all the important parts.

tomchick

Fair enough. And I don’t mean to gloss over the issue, particularly since I’m keenly aware of it when I actually *like* a game and a bunch of angry fans react as if I’d desecrated it. But Metacritic is only as good as the data fed into it, and I feel one of the ways to make Metacritic better is to ensure that the data reflects a wider range of opinions beyond the usual 7-9 spread.

gearsfan

you don’t know what you’re talking about. it’s a shame that a site like this are allowed to post their scores on sites like metacritic